This paper describes a network of three interconnected, multidisciplinary research projects designed to investigate environmental health issues faced by First Nations in Canada. These projects, developed in collaboration with academia, used a participatory approach meant to build capacity, raise awareness, and initiate change. The first project, which began in British Columbia in 2008, gathered information on the traditional diet; for example, its composition, nutritional quality, and potential for chemical exposure. This 10-year, Canada-wide project served as a model for two follow-up (...) projects: one on biomonitoring and another on indoor air quality. All three projects provided community ownership over the data and communicated results in a culturally sensitive manner to encourage interest in research and initiate risk reduction activities. The Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization representing over 630 First Nations communities across Canada, participated in all aspects of the research while coordinating communications and arranging timely dissemination of results. These projects showed how properly executed, community-based research can be a valuable tool for stimulating interest in scientific studies while promoting self-reliance, components often missing from academic research. (shrink)

Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit illustrates with true stories that we live in an interactive, aware world in which the creatures around us in our neighborhoods know us and sometimes reach across to us, empathically and helpfully. Implications are that all beings live in a possible "common mind" from which our mass culture has disconnected, but which is only a heartbeat and some concentrated attention away. This mind encompasses microbial life and insects as well as creatures and extends to nonmaterial intelligence (...) as well-that is to say, spirit. Creatures as varied as a collaborating dragonfly, ants rescuing each other, a sympathetic lizard, an empathic coyote, gift-giving squirrels, crazed birds, and lots of very mysteriously smart cats inhabit the stories. Precognition, dreams, paranormal experiences with birds, psychic communications with cats, visitations from ghosts with messages, rolling earth spirits-not supernatural, they seem natural enough but not visible to everyone. The intention of this book is to help people catch interactions they themselves experience with nonhuman and even disembodied beings, and who could use some support for recalling since these interactions make clear we live in a sentient world. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of objective phenomenology, or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

This study draws on Kohlberg''s Cognitive Moral Development Theory and Hofstede''s Culture Theory to examine whether cultural differences are associated with variations in ethical reasoning. Ethical reasoning levels for auditors from Australia and China are expected to be different since auditors from China and Australia are also different in terms of the cultural dimensions of long term orientation, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualism. The Defining Issues Tests measuring ethical reasoning P scores were distributed to auditors from Australia and China (...) including Hong Kong and The Chinese Mainland. Results show that auditors from Australia have higher ethical reasoning scores than those from China, consistent with Hofstede''s Culture Theory predictions. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a decision (...) not to move. There was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation. We conclude that Libet’s results do not provide evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. (shrink)

The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

In this article we explore the role of data custodians in establishing and maintaining social licence for the use of personal information in health research. Personal information from population‐level data collections can be used to make significant contributions to health and medical research, but this use is dependent on community acceptance or a social licence. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with data custodians across Australia to better understand data custodians’ views on their roles and responsibilities. This inductive, thematic analysis of the (...) interview data focuses on three factors that contribute to social licence – reciprocity, non‐exploitation and the public good. While the data custodians interviewed did not explicitly frame their role in the context of social licence, their descriptions of their roles and responsibilities clearly indicated that they did have some role to play in building and maintaining social licence. (shrink)

Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017), and Schellenberg (2018). I show how such theories can be extended so that they cover such cases without giving (...) up their core commitments. (shrink)

Some accounts of moral responsibility hold that an agent's responsibility is completely determined by some aspect of the agent's mental life at the time of action. For example, some hold that an agent is responsible if and only if there is an appropriate mesh among the agent's particular psychological elements. It is often objected that the particular features of the agent's mental life to which these theorists appeal (such as a particular structure or mesh) are not necessary for responsibility. This (...) is because there appear to be cases in which an agent acts at an earlier time which causes her to lack the appropriate psychological features at some later time and yet, intuitively, she is responsible at that later .. (shrink)

Biobanks for long-term research pose challenges to the legal and ethical validity of consent to participate. Different models of consent have been proposed to answer some of these challenges. This paper contributes to this discussion by considering the meaning and value of consent to participants in biobanks. Empirical data from a qualitative study is used to provide a participant view of the consent process and to demonstrate that, despite limited understanding of the research, consent provides the research participants with some (...) level of control and a form of self determination that they value. Participation is framed as a moral act of a responsible citizen providing reinforcement of self identity. Consent symbolizes the trust invested in researchers and research institutions to use the biobank for the public good. The paper argues that consent continues to play an important role in biobank participation and that a participant view should inform proposals to modify consent processes. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a proposition seeming true. Many think that these seeming states can yield justified beliefs. Very few have seriously explored what these seeming states are. I argue that seeming states are not plausibly analyzed in terms of beliefs, partial beliefs, attractions to believe, or inclinations to believe. Given that the main candidates for analyzing seeming states are unsatisfactory, I argue for a brute view of seemings that treats seeming states as irreducible propositional attitudes.

There is little doubt that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now a global concept and a prominent feature of international business, with its practice localised and differing across countries. Despite the growing body of research focussing on CSR in developing countries, there is dearth research on CSR institutionalisation in African countries. Drawing on institutional theory (IT), this article examines the focus and form of CSR practice of companies in Kenya. It is evident from our findings that the nature and orientation (...) of CSR differ across companies with operations only in Kenya and those headquartered abroad or with international operations. Significantly, firm-related drivers such as public relations and performance, as well as global institutional pressures explain the focus and form of CSR in Kenya. This article concludes that for the institutionalisation of CSR in Kenya, attention must be paid to conditions that stifle CSR uptake such as lack of government regulations, and the government's capacity and commitment to enforce regulation. The establishment of functional CSR institutions and a vibrant civil society that advance civil regulation ought to be encouraged. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

The growing global prominence of Chinese state-owned enterprises brings new dimensions to our understanding of multi-national corporations and human rights issues. This article constructs a three-level framework that enables the mapping of transnational, national, and intra-organizational human rights pressures, and uses this framework to identify and analyze the human rights that Chinese SOEs report concern with. The analysis provided suggests that while China’s most global SOEs are subject to transnational pressures to respect all human rights, such pressures appear outweighed by (...) those encouraging them to concentrate on only some human rights within their national and intra-organizational environment. The article concludes by identifying a number of ways in which our conceptual framework and empirical findings can inform future research. (shrink)

This book brings together an international group of scholars to discuss the ramifications of Heidegger's Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself.

The mental patients' liberation movement, which started in the early 1970s, is a political movement comprised of people who have experienced psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. Its two main goals are developing self-help alternatives to medically-based psychiatric treatment and securing full citizenship rights for people labeled "mentally ill." The movement questions the medical model of "mental illness," and insists that people who have been labeled as "mentally ill" speak on their own behalf and not be represented by others who claim to (...) speak "for" them. The movement has developed its own philosophy, and operates a variety of self-help and mutual support programs in which ex-patients themselves control the services that are offered. Despite obstacles, the movement continues to grow and develop. (shrink)

This paper reviews major structural drivers of place-based health disparities in the context of Canada, an industrialized nation with a strong public health system. Likelihood that the COVID-19 pandemic will facilitate rejuvenation of Canada’s northern and remote areas through remote working, advances in online teaching and learning, and the increased use of telemedicine are also examined. The paper concludes by identifying some common themes to address healthcare disparities for northern and remote Canadian residents.

For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be true. And so there (...) is sometimes still rational room for doubt. The goal of this paper is to present four different models of what “certainty” amounts to, for Kant, each of which is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

In his 1978 paper “Mathematical Explanation”, Mark Steiner attempts to modernize the Aristotelian idea that to explain a mathematical statement is to deduce it from the essence of entities figuring in the statement, by replacing talk of essences with talk of “characterizing properties”. The language Steiner uses is reminiscent of language used for proofs deemed “pure”, such as Selberg and Erdős’ elementary proofs of the prime number theorem avoiding the complex analysis of earlier proofs. Hilbert characterized pure proofs as those (...) that use only “means that are suggested by the content of the theorem”, a characterization we have elsewhere called “topical purity”. In this paper we will examine the connection between Steiner’s account of mathematical explanation and topical purity. Are Steiner-explanatory proofs necessarily topically pure? Are topically pure proofs necessarily Steiner-explanatory? Answers to these questions will shed light on the general question of the relation between purity and explanatory power. (shrink)

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...) organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

From a twenty-first century partnership between bioethics and neuroscience, the modern field of neuroethics is emerging, and technologies enabling functional neuroimaging with unprecedented sensitivity have brought new ethical, social and legal issues to the forefront. Some issues, akin to those surrounding modern genetics, raise critical questions regarding prediction of disease, privacy and identity. However, with new and still-evolving insights into our neurobiology and previously unquantifiable features of profoundly personal behaviors such as social attitude, value and moral agency, the difficulty of (...) carefully and properly interpreting the relationship between brain findings and our own self-concept is unprecedented. Therefore, while the ethics of genetics provides a legitimate starting point - even a backbone - for tackling ethical issues in neuroimaging, they do not suffice. Drawing on recent neuroimaging findings and their plausible real-world applications, we argue that interpretation of neuroimaging data is a key epistemological and ethical challenge. This challenge is two-fold. First, at the scientific level, the sheer complexity of neuroscience research poses challenges for integration of knowledge and meaningful interpretation of data. Second, at the social and cultural level, we find that interpretations of imaging studies are bound by cultural and anthropological frameworks. In particular, the introduction of concepts of self and personhood in neuroimaging illustrates the interaction of interpretation levels and is a major reason why ethical reflection on genetics will only partially help settle neuroethical issues. Indeed, ethical interpretation of such findings will necessitate not only traditional bioethical input but also a wider perspective on the construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This three-part chapter explores a higher-order logic we call ‘Classicism’, which extends a minimal classical higher-order logic with further axioms which guarantee that provable coextensiveness is sufficient for identity. The first part presents several different ways of axiomatizing this theory and makes the case for its naturalness. The second part discusses two kinds of extensions of Classicism: some which take the view in the direction of coarseness of grain (whose endpoint is the maximally coarse-grained view that coextensiveness is sufficient for (...) identity), and some which take the view in the direction of fineness of grain (whose endpoint is the maximally fine-grained theory containing all distinctness claims compatible with Classicism). The third part introduces some techniques for constructing models of Classicism, and uses them to prove the consistency of many of the extensions of Classicism introduced in the second part. (shrink)

Introduction -- The significance of story -- Morphogenic fields -- The universe story and Christian story -- Morphic resonance : two stories converge -- The "kingdom of God" -- Emerging capacities -- Meditation -- The power of intention -- The fields converge -- A field of compassion -- Manifesting a field of compassion -- Engaging the grace we imagine.

This book is designed to be an easy-to-use guide to understanding the ethical and biosecurity implications of life science research. It provides a framework that will enable scientists, lab managers, researchers, students and teachers to anticipate how research may be used to cause harm, and to identify the steps that can be taken to minimise this risk. Life science research is covered by two international weapons treaties and the tools presented in this book will help scientists and researchers to meet (...) their responsibilities under these conventions. This book will help you: Assess real and potential risks in relation to your work Identify and implement a range of relevant ethical principles that need to be considered in your work Use an ethical framework to protect your work from misuse by others. If you've never been sure of how ethics relates to your work this toolkit will help you understand the challenges you do indeed face. Real-world case studies of biosecurity risks and failures will help scientists and all those who work to support science at all levels come to a new understanding of the widespread potential for misuse of research in the life sciences. By asking the questions set out in this book, scientists will be better able to recognise and reduce these risks. This framework is designed to be useful for senior scientists as well as students, and all researchers in between. (shrink)

The aim of the Analytic of Concepts is to derive and deduce a set of pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, which play a central role in Kant’s explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition and judgment. This chapter is structured around two questions. First, what is a pure concept of the understanding? Second, what is involved in a deduction of a pure concept of the understanding? In answering the first, we focus on how the categories differ (...) from the pure forms of sensibility and examine whether they are known only to be the pure forms of human thinking or rather the forms of discursive cognition as such. In answering the second, we draw a distinction between the application and the exemplification of the categories and use it to identify different ways of understanding Kant’s project in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. These questions connect because the answer to the first determines how we should understand the kind of entitlement which is to be established in the Deduction. (shrink)

Recent advances in the brain sciences have dramatically improved our understanding of brain function. As we find out more and more about what makes us tick, we must stop and consider the ethical implications of this new found knowledge. This ground-breaking book on the emerging field of neuroethics answers many pertinent questions, such as: What makes monitoring and manipulating the human brain so ethically challenging? Will having a new biology of the brain through imaging make us less responsible for our (...) behavior and lose our free will? Should certain brain scan studies be disallowed on the basis of moral grounds? A distinguished group of contributors from a wide range of fields make this an invaluable introduction to neuroethics. (shrink)

This article explores how the shift from print to electronic calendars materializes and exacerbates a distinctively quantitative, “spreadsheet” orientation to time. Drawing on interviews with engineers, I argue that calendaring systems are emblematic of a larger design rationale in Silicon Valley to mechanize human thought and action in order to make them more efficient and reliable. The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history and continues to animate contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of (...) what automation will deliver. In the current moment we live in the age of the algorithm and machine learning, so it is no wonder, then, that the contemporary design of digital calendars is driven by a vision of intelligent time management. As I go on to show in the second part of the article, this vision is increasingly realized in the form of intelligent digital assistants whose tracking capacities and behavioral algorithms aim to solve life’s existential problem—how best to organize the time of our lives. This article contributes to STS scholarship on the role of technological artifacts in generating new temporalities that shape people’s perception of time, how they act in the world, and how they understand themselves. (shrink)

The handbook contains more than 50 chapters by leaders from around the world and a broad range of sectors of academia and clinical practice spanning the ...

The fallacy fallacy is either the misdiagnosis of fallacy or the supposition that the conclusion of a fallacy must be a falsehood. This paper explores the relevance of these and related errors of reasoning for the appraisal of arguments, especially within virtue theories of argumentation. In particular, the fallacy fallacy exemplifies the Owl of Minerva problem, whereby tools devised to understand a norm make possible new ways of violating the norm. Fallacies are such tools and so are vices. Hence a (...) similar problem arises with argumentative vices. Fortunately, both instances of the problem have a common remedy. (shrink)

Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...) themselves substantive. (shrink)